Energy consumption, and planning to provide for expected future demand, is an ever increasing concern for individuals, businesses, utilities, and the government. Traditionally, energy consumption (e.g., electric and natural gas, in addition to other resources such as water) has been metered in bulk using meters between the utility and the point of consumption (e.g., homes and buildings). While these meters provide an effective manner of monitoring overall use for billing purposes, these meters provide little information about the energy consumption beyond the meter.
More recently, so-called “smart” meters have been deployed in various locales. The term smart meter typically refers to electric meters, but can also be extended to other types of meters. Smart meters record consumption in time intervals, and communicate the time and corresponding usage to remote locations for more detailed monitoring. For example, smart meters may enable real-time or near real-time monitoring of electric consumption which enables the identification of usage patterns. The utility companies may use this information to better anticipate demand and/or provide feedback to the consumers for making better use of their energy consumption.
While smart meters provide better granularity in the measurements, even smart meters lack any ability to quantitatively understand consumption among a number of different types of consumers (e.g., buildings and people in those buildings). Any patterns and/or use characteristics are identified manually, using prior experience and ad hoc methods, and therefore are subject to wide variations and errors in any conclusions that can be drawn from the data. There is no meaningful way to compare energy consumption of different buildings. Consumption cannot be directly compared because the building characteristics may be very different.